Tag Archive: rights

1936: Lebensraum(help·info) (German for “habitat” or literally “living space“) was one of the major genocidal political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology. It served as the motivation for the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany, aiming to provide extra space for the growth of the German population, for a Greater Germany. In Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, he detailed his belief that the German people needed Lebensraum (“living space”, i.e. land and raw materials), and that it should be found in Eastern Europe. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with Germanic people. The entire urban population was to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing their replacement by a German upper class.

2012: Imposing policies which effectively force single people, small families, divorced, bereaved or mentally/physically disabled from larger Council/Housing Association houses: ie, forcing anyone receiving Benefits from their homes by changing Housing Benefit Rules in order to impose a burden of payment for unoccupied rooms – is, in effect, identical to the effect of disempowering, dispossessing and removing any right of freedom.

2012: The core issue to identify slavery or slave-labour in this situation is that: – Slaves can be held against their will. Slaves can be deprived of the right to refuse work or to leave without penalty. This Government has imposed a de-facto state of ‘debt-bondage‘ upon all those who are unable to work through impairment, disability or simple unemployment. That is Slavery!

The debt-bondage is held by the Government and is enforced in the form of “sanctions” – these ‘sanctions’ deprive a citizen of part or all of their benefits for a supposed infraction or breaking of imposed rigidly-applied ‘rules.’ Alongside this, it is made plain (though the threat is somewhat ambiguously stated publicly) that refusal to do ‘x’ or ‘y’ will result in sanctions being applied. This is State Indenture and another ‘de-facto’ form of enslavement. The final form of enslavement is much more insidious, for it calls upon the citizen to ‘volunteer’ to their own enslavement. There is no definitively explicit ‘punishment’ for not Volunteering, but it is ‘suggested’ that sanctions may be applied for some other supposed infringement. This too is a de-facto form of enslavement popularized in Third World Dictatorships – because through the threat of some ‘other’ punishment other than death (rather by threat of mutilation or amputation) , young boys and men were pressed into becoming pro-dictatorship ‘guerillas.’ The example may seem exaggerated, but its effect is the same – even in non-lethal circumstances.

1936: The expression comes from the title of a novel by German philologist Lorenz Diefenbach, Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbach (1873), in which gamblers and fraudsters find the path to virtue through labour.[2] The phrase was also used in French (“le travail rend libre!”) by Auguste Forel, a Swiss ant scientist, neuroanatomist and psychiatrist, in his “Fourmis de la Suisse” [“Ants of Switzerland”] (1920).[3] In 1922, the Deutsche Schulverein of Vienna, an ethnic nationalist “protective” organization of Germans within the Austrian empire, printed membership stamps with the phrase Arbeit macht frei. It was adopted in 1928 by the Weimar government as a slogan extolling the effects of their desired policy of large-scale public works programmes to end unemployment. This use of the phrase was continued by the Nazi Partywhen it came to power in 1933.

Raised over the entrance to Auschwitz I where, according to BBC historian Laurence Rees in his “Auschwitz: a New History”, the sign was erected by order of commandant Rudolf Höss.

At Buchenwald, “Jedem das Seine” (literally, “to each his own”, but idiomatically “everyone gets what he deserves”) was used.

In The Kingdom of Auschwitz, Otto Friedrich wrote regarding Höss:

He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labour does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom.[8]

2012: Minister for Work And Pensions Ian Duncan-Smith uses the phrase “Work makes you free..” (Ger. Arbeit Macht frei..) during a BBC Radio Four interview.. protesting that what he ‘means’ is that “any kind of work makes you feel freer, more empowered, more a part of society..” However, in the light of policies Ian Duncan-Smith imposed upon those in receipt of all manner of State Benefits (and in particular those who have had their ‘disabilities’ or ‘sicknesses’ assessed under outsourcing to ATOS (a private medical company based in France) through the Work Capability Assessment, the suggestion has been made that IDS meant his ‘Work makes Freedom’ comment in the ‘literary’ sense, and that the Minister for Work & Pensions was actually alluding to the notion that he was suggesting that most unemployed, disabled and sick people were/are “gamblers and fraudsters” who “require to find the path to virtue through labour!”Probably the most scurrilous allusion any Minister has ever suggested under the mask of a supposedly “compassionate nature.”

If such historical remarks, references, comments, political policies and social policies are to be continually invoked by this Coalition – I have only one question?

Just how much of ‘Meine Kampf’ has this Government decided to ‘borrow’ from?